Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (9 page)

Barack Obama, by some gift of personality, sent out a flash of inspiration that called the exiled strain of idealism back into U.S. politics. It was not so much that he made politics exciting as that he gave some warrant for the thought it could be worthy.

He is not Lincoln. He is not, despite
Time
’s saccharine innuendo, better than the guy from the manger. But he’s the one who’s given the process of politics a second chance in our time. Person of the year. Easily.

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France … and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.”

That’s Edmund Burke reflecting on the fate of Marie Antoinette. He was, as we should say today, a fan. “I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy.”

The prose has a touch of that Chris Matthews “thrill up my leg” quality, although of course infinitely more refined than anything produced to date, either above or below, the host of
Hardball
’s knee: “I thought 10,000 swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone …”

Prophetic Burke. He was right about the age of chivalry. But the age of powdered encomium, what we would call the “puff piece,” is still very much with us.

Celebrity reportage, witlessness in full genuflection to tackiness, has exploded the meanings of flattery and
self-abasement. Entertainment reporters, as they deliriously regard themselves, are high-paid oxymorons. They all but lick the shoes of those they cover, and even that exemption is, I’m fairly confident, not total.

Till very recently, the worship of celebrities was more or less confined to high-gloss, low-IQ entertainment magazines and their TV equivalents. But with the advent of Barack Obama—and, I should insist, not at his prompting—it has done a worrisome crossover. In the year blessedly past, we had a column in the San Francisco
Chronicle
that makes even Burke’s ode seem hesitant, ambiguous even.

The columnist wrote, gasped, thrilled, vibrated that Mr. Obama was “ … that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health-care plans … but who can actually help usher in
a new way of being on the planet
, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us
evolve
.” Rhapsody is too timid a word.

Mr. Obama, the column reveals, is a Lightworker, a new-age messianic superpresence. The heading over this prostration, er, column was: “Is Obama an enlightened being?” Call Steven Spielberg. E.T. is back.

There have been other descriptions of Mr. Obama during the primaries and the election that have been almost as dementedly ardent.

Normally, the press stands apart from mass adulation. Not so with Mr. Obama. A recent report in
The Washington
Post
read like a mash note from a teenager. The article had a picture of the Lightworker, shirtless, and commented: “ … he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions.” I beg to differ. Pass the defibrillator, now.

The reporter/disciple was, however, just warming up. Next, he galloped off into territory left unexplored even in the perspiration-saturated pages of chicklit: “The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.”

If this guy gives up the politics beat, there are a hundred massage parlours out there thirsty for this kind of copy. This is
The Washington Post
, remember. Has the financial crisis tipped the collective media mind into entertainment-reporting mode?

Very little of this, I repeat, is Mr. Obama’s fault. (Although that famous line of his on winning the nomination as “the moment when the rise of the seas began to slow and the planet began to heal” was an unhappy toe-dip into the waters of absurd self-inflation.) But if the mainstream press offers “the sun glinted off chiselled pectorals,” let’s stop calling it news. This is
Baywatch
punditry.

Not worth a mention? On the contrary, there swirls around the figure or persona of Mr. Obama a set of expectations radically disconnected from rationality. He cannot possibly match the fantasies he inspires in some. It’s worth
wondering whether eight years of equal but opposite irrationality—the hysterically negative coverage of George W. Bush—has produced its own counter-response. Or whether that strand of new-age therapeutics, the Dr. Phil/Oprah “self-realization” claptrap, has warped U.S. politics into a kind of abysmal “healing workshop.” That would certainly account for some Americans thinking they’ve elected a Lightworker rather than a president.

The press should be trimming these fantasies, not constructing them. But it’s easier to sigh than to analyze. So on Inauguration Day, don’t be surprised if you read a story that begins (alas, poor Burke), “And surely never lighted on this orb, which he hardly seemed to touch …”

Put him on a platform and Barack Obama can take any string of words and make them sing. He’s the best speech performer of our day.

His voice has charm and power. He has an instinctive sense of the lyric and rhythmic underpinning of language, those surplus properties that impart a power beyond sense, beyond just what the words say. He has mastered the timing of public address, when to pause, when to rush a phrase, how to link gesture and stance to moments of emphasis. This is the full package.

Barack Obama could read a string of fortune cookie messages and some people would come away thinking they’d heard the Gettysburg Address.

He gave a great performance Tuesday. The speech itself, however, was a dud. So much skill operating on so lifeless a text. It was Vladimir Horowitz playing “Chopsticks.” A speech that has hardly begun gives us clouds that are “gathering,” storms that are “raging,” a fear that is “nagging,” grievances that are “petty,” interests that are “narrow” and decisions that are “unpleasant” displays an alarming hospitality to cliché. Is there a dull-adjective shop in the new White House?

If they carve this one in marble, the appropriate subscript will read: Bring me your poor, your tired, your hackneyed phrases—your obvious descriptors yearning to be twee.

It contains sentences that begin as merely flat but end in perfect banality: “Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.” How many times have you heard that sad rhetorical turn? And where the sentence should deliver its punch, in comes the pale tepid verbal paint of “too many big plans.”

There are sentences of pure fudge: “We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.” The first half of that sentence should have been the plainer declaration that the war against insurgent forces and al-Qaeda in Iraq has turned to success, and might have made a mention of the general, David Petraeus, who worked the change. He’s why Mr. Obama can leave.

The second half is a pure skate. Mr. Obama is going to “forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan”? Actually, he’s going to re-engage in an unfinished war with 30,000 or so new troops. Mr. Obama’s words make it seem like peace is the starting point. Afghanistan may be as tough for him as Iraq was for George Bush.

Do you have a sleepy idea? Give it a platitude to curl up in. Has there ever been a chamber of commerce speech that has
not
included this sentence: “The state of the economy calls for action … and we will act—not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” Poor old growth. Always laying that new foundation.

Mr. Obama’s few ventures into vivid metaphor were not always happy or consistent: “We have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united.” The Civil War wasn’t a taste of anything. Neither was segregation. Both were a full meal, one of horror, the other of dishonour to the nation’s ideals. I’m not sure “swill” belongs in there at all, but it’s a strange swill that half a phrase later is a “dark chapter.” It should have been, in any case, dark chapters (war and segregation)—plural.

Finally, I’d like to note what isn’t in this inaugural address. There is no citation of that one greater orator, whose inspiring words and assassination-amputated life reconfigured the conscience of America so that a black politician becoming its president became truly possible: Martin Luther King.

The real preface to Mr. Obama’s inaugural address, the precondition of his being able to deliver it, will be found in Dr. King’s immensely superior “I have a dream” speech. It is inexplicable that Dr. King, the most eloquent man America produced in the twentieth century, was not quoted directly by a president whose elevation to office should be seen as the consummation of Dr. King’s martyred life’s effort.

An inaugural address worthy of its occasion winds history into its every sentence. Echo and allusion, direct quotation, bind the day to the great words and deeds of all the days before it. Mr. Obama’s speech would have gained both power and grace by direct citation of the unquestioned hero of the civil-rights movement.

But this week’s address, sadly, was far less than its moment, and in much need of all the genuine power and grace a reference to that grand and fully eloquent man, Martin Luther King, would have given it.

We are, I hope, past the hollow fury that greeted Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ
. Mr. Gibson has done well for himself—even Michael Moore must envy the box-office success of
The Passion
. Of course, here in Canada, we’ve had the irritant of the recent federal election to keep our minds off things godly, even those that come with previews and in Dolby sound.

Election past, I’ve felt some need to put the satanic thoroughly behind me, and found a welcome means in a couple of books about William Tyndale, the earliest translator of the New Testament into English. I hadn’t realized till now that his work was so foundational to the great text of the King James Version, which has had the approval of centuries for its elegance, beauty and pith. Poor Tyndale got burnt at the stake for his labours.

Two books exhaust the glories of the English language: that great translation, worked by the scholars and linguists of
the early seventeenth century, and the works of Shakespeare. Between them, Shakespeare and the King James set the limits of what the English language is capable of, in poetry or prose, in rhythm and cadence, in eloquence and plain speaking. It takes a nervy person to tamper with either of them.

Alas, there are always nervy people. Shakespeare has been bowdlerized, amputated, updated, and there is even a plain-language version put out for the “benefit” of college students. I read a sample in a downtown bookstore recently: “Wha’ sup, Romeo?” Fortunately, there was a washroom nearby.

But the Bible, being a sacred book, possesses, one would think, more defences and stronger sanctions against vandalism by the tasteless. Alas, no. New versions of the Bible have always been with us, but with the age of therapy, feminism and the dread, clammy spectre of inclusiveness, the poor old Bible has been pillaged—they call it “updating the text”—by more Visigoths than humbled Rome. About the only qualification these modern updates bring to the art of translation is an absolute tone-deafness to the prose they set out with such reckless insolence to mutilate.

The latest torment is a translation going under the inspiring rubric
Good as New
. It is what the makers of computer commercials call user-friendly.

A few samples are all I have space for. Let us try the famous, sad episode where Peter, the chief of the apostles, denies Christ. The earlier version, familiar to Christians worldwide from the Authorized Version: “Now Peter sat
without in the palace: and a damsel came unto him, saying, ‘Thou also was with Jesus of Galilee.’ But he denied before them all, saying, ‘I know not what thou sayest.’”